Am not anti-priest, but…

WHEN SOMEONE sent me a message which, in capsule, extolled the divine role of priests, I thought I conveyed the wrong impression that I am anti-priest because of some of my columns criticizing them. The truth is that I revere priests so much that I expect saintliness in them. Now this could be an expectation so high as to be cruel, but these are times that call for saintly commitment.

And, yes, these are the times of the prophecy in Garabandal, Spain where the Blessed Mother said on June 18, 1965: “Many cardinals, many bishops, and many priests are on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them.”

This prophesy so terrifies that any criticism of any man of the cloth should be taken only constructively: it’s an appeal to ward off inclusion in the prophecy.

What the Blessed Mother said in Garabandal can also be gathered from Jesus Christ Himself in His messages to mystic Maria Valtorta.

Jesus said as follows:

“When the time comes, many stars will be shaken from the coils of Lucifer, who, in order to win, needs to diminish the lights of souls.

“This can happen because not only lay people, but also ecclesiastics have lost and are increasingly losing the firmness of faith, charity, strength, purity, and detachment from the seductions of the world needed to remain in the orbit of God’s light.

“Do you understand who the stars I am speaking about are? They are the ones I have described as salt of the earth and light of the world: My ministers.

“Satan’s piercing malice studies the way to extinguish these luminaries, that are lights reflecting My Light for the multitudes, by shaking them. If, with all the light the priestly Church is still emitting, souls are sinking deeper and deeper into darkness, the kind of darkness which will crush the multitudes when many stars fade out in My sky is obvious.

“Satan knows this and sows his seeds to prepare the weakness of the priesthood, so as to be able to overwhelm it easily in sins, not so much of sense as of thought. In mental chaos it will be easy for him to provoke spiritual chaos. In spiritual chaos the weak, faced with the flood of persecutions, will commit the sin of cowardice, denying the faith.

“The Church will not die because I will be with her. But she will experience hours of darkness and horror similar to those of My Passion, multiplied over time because it must be that way.

“The Church must suffer what Her Creator suffered, before dying to rise again in an eternal form. The Church must suffer much longer because the Church, in her members, is not perfect, like her Creator, and if I suffered for hours, she must suffer for weeks and weeks of hours.

“As she rose persecuted and nourished by supernatural power in the early times and in her best children, exactly the same will happen to her when the last times come, during which she will exist, subsist, and resist the Satanic tide and the battles of the Antichrist with her best children. A painful, but just selection.

“It is logical that, in a world where so many spiritual lights will be extinguished, there will be manifestly established the short-lived, but tremendous reign of the Antichrist, generated by Satan just as Christ was generated by the Father. Christ, the Son of the Father, generated by Love with Purity. The Antichrist, the son of Satan, generated by Hatred with the threefold Impurity.

“Like olives between the wheels of the oil press, the children of Christ will be persecuted, squashed, and crunched by the voracious Beast. But not swallowed, for the Blood will not allow them to be corrupted in spirit. Like the first ones, the last will be cut down like sheaves of ears of grain in the final persecution, and the earth will drink in their blood. But eternally blessed for their perseverance are those who die faithful to the Lord.”